Issues

A frequent trope in apocalyptic literature is a war between time and knowledge. Focusing on Rita Indiana’s “cli-fi” novel La mucama de Omicunlé (Omicunlé’s Maid), this essay explores the ambiguous role that uncertainty plays in apocalyptic literature. It argues that time travel seeks to revert the result of negative actions in the past, eliminating uncertainty retrospectively. And yet moral freedom, the mark of the human, requires uncertainty to function, which thwarts time travel as a messianic genre. Yet even in failure, time travel reminds us that impending disaster is contingent on specific individual and collective action, suggesting that the future could still perhaps be otherwise.

Language conflict is a common feature of Caribbean literary production, but multilingual experimentation can be obscured by the scholarly organization of the region into blocs defined by colonial languages. Recent attention to literary multilingualism in comparative literature offers potential critical tools to investigate the region’s linguistic variability. However, European-focused scholarship prioritizes a national focus that cannot account for the complex relationships between colonial languages and Caribbean Creoles. This essay considers three works from the Dominican Republic and Jamaica: the anthology Palabras de una isla / Paroles d’une île, Juan Bosch’s story “Luis Pie,” and the Groundwork Theater Company’s Fallen Angel and the Devil Concubine. The author argues that these texts emphasize different critical priorities from the standard concerns of theorists of literary multilingualism. Consequently, these writers employ a broad range of literary strategies that enrich decolonial conversations about social transformation by imagining models of communication that challenge colonial language hierarchies.

This essay contends that Caribbean conceptualizations of relation, understood through the theorizing and political organizing of women of color feminists, offer decolonial possibilities that enable radical remappings of the Afro-Atlantic. The essay argues that the political and intellectual contributions of theories of relationality and decolonial feminisms by women of color should be understood as theoretical and methodological tools for approaching some of the most peripheralized Afro-diasporic works. To that end, it examines the histories and the interconnected literary imaginaries that exist across the Afro-Latinx Caribbean (Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic), Equatorial Guinea (the only Spanish-speaking nation-state in Sub-Saharan Africa), and their diasporic cultural productions in the United States and Spain. The essay ultimately argues that women of color and decolonial feminist discourses and ethics help us understand literary and cultural productions as insurgent practices that are central to tracking and reformulating notions of decoloniality and Afro-diasporic studies.

This essay introduces the special section “Con-Federating the Archipelago: The Confederación Antillana and the West Indies Federation,” which interrogates the literary, intellectual, social, and political imaginaries fomented by the Confederación Antillana (Antillean Confederation) and the West Indies Federation, with the aim of promoting comparative studies and dialogue among scholars working on these two political projects. The Confederación Antillana was conceived to bring together three Spanish Antilles in dialogue with Haiti and Jamaica from the 1860s to 1898; the West Indies Federation became a governing body in the British Caribbean territories from 1958–62. These “con-federated” forms reverberate together in the idea of trans-Caribbean unity as a utopian reference for anti-imperial sovereignty and the decolonial achievement of racial equality. The guest editors provide a historical trajectory of both confederation projects in order to identify points of convergence and divergence between these two collective political projects to guide future comparative studies.

This essay examines the aesthetics and politics of one of the key figures in the emergence of the Caribbean anti-imperial imaginary in the nineteenth century: the Afro–Puerto Rican activist Ramón Emeterio Betances (1827–98). Through a critical interpretation of Les deux Indiens (1857), a romantic novella about the conquest of Puerto Rico, and “A Cuba Libre” (1871), a biographical essay about Haiti’s first president, Alexandre Pétion, the author explores Betances’s vision of Caribbean unity and its connections to race, gender, republicanism, and decolonization.

This essay explores Eugenio María de Hostos’s and Ramón E. Betances’s notions of modern subjectivities, in the context of Romantic narratives, to index the fractures of collective and communal nationalist imaginaries within the Caribbean Confederation. Hostos and Betances were champions of the Antillean Confederation’s idea, but one must wonder why two modern political thinkers recur to the representation of unsuccessful heroes in their fictional texts. Through literary rhetoric, Betances and Hostos proposed a modern subjectivity that could promote national unity and collective political solidarities. Yet, surprisingly, their literary characters are instead inserted in a discourse that verges on a rhetoric of failure that contradicts the positive modern impulse of national/regional constructions.

Examining the West Indies Federation during the twentieth century against the backdrop of the US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 shows the complex roots of decolonization and helps us understand the occupation as a foundational event for the twentieth-century Caribbean imaginary, much as the Haitian Revolution was for the nineteenth. The occupation is usually considered only in relation to its impacts in Haiti and the United States, but Haiti’s symbolic significance meant that its occupation shaped the perspectives of Caribbean people throughout the region. Major thinkers of federation, particularly Richard B. Moore and George Padmore, developed their political perspectives through responses to the occupation. We can thus see the questioning of nation-state independence and the critique of neocolonialism (as a form of US economic imperialism allied with elites in the neocolony) emerge from the lessons of Haiti’s occupation.

The West Indies Federation, like the Confederación Antillana from the nineteenth century, was structured by a tension between the dream of a future Pan-Caribbean nation and the prospect of a sovereign archipelagic political body that would exceed the scope of the nation-state. Because of this tension, even if the vocabulary of “Caribbean nationalism” appears to determine debates about the drive to anticolonial sovereignty embedded in the project of federation, veritably “un-national” forms also abound in discourses around both federation projects. This essay highlights discursive forms pertaining to the West Indies Federation that often “pass” for nationalism while exceeding its bounds, arguing that these forms, ranging between an attachment to empire and the critique of empire, resist assimilation into nationalist frameworks.

This essay explores the particular importance conferred on literary expression within a wide range of writings dedicated to understanding and responding to the project of the West Indies Federation. Although federation was conceived, and briefly achieved, as a political expression of community building and people making, the consistent practice of referencing and invoking literary works across these writings reveals the project’s central and necessary investment in the reimagination of identities and belongings. Yet while the literary expression of a West Indian sensibility helped to articulate the political consciousness necessary for change, it could not finally overcome the sources of tension in the region. Importantly, too, the same West Indian writers who symbolized the collective belonging to the region, so cherished by federation, were themselves embroiled in the discordant realities of economic markets and measures and caught between national and international belongings.

This essay argues that the short-lived West Indies Federation (1958–62) was not only undermined by the failure of the regional intelligentsia to comprehensively communicate a narrative of regionalism to the majority of the archipelago’s peoples but also further compromised by the BBC Caribbean Voices literary radio program broadcast to the region between 1943 and 1958. During this fifteen-year period leading up to federation, Caribbean Voices broadcast West Indian literature, as well as critical commentary by the program’s longest serving editor, Henry Swanzy, that generally emphasized territorial rather than regional nationalism. Consequently, the program’s content had the inadvertent effect of undermining the narrative of regionalism, at the popular level, that BBC officialdom and the region’s intelligentsia seemed to have taken for granted. The essay therefore concludes that the narrative failure of federation was prefigured in the widely and more persuasively articulated story of territorial nationalism that was presented in much of the literature and editorial commentary broadcast to the region via Caribbean Voices in the decade and a half leading up to federation.

This response essay reviews the six contributions to the special section “Con-Federating the Archipelago: The Confederación Antillana and the West Indies Federation.” These key interventions on the Spanish Caribbean Confederation projects in the nineteenth century and the West Indies Federation in the twentieth century provoke the following questions: Could we call these two Caribbean confederation projects failures if their centrality in Caribbean political imaginaries suggests otherwise? What are some of the insights that these two projects could offer to Caribbean sociohistorical processes, culture, and political developments? Even though these two projects seem to share a similar political goal, they are also radically different. The author reviews the contributions to the special section in dialogue with examples from Puerto Rico in order to assess the critical intervention in theories of nationalism produced by the past projects of federation and the possible futures they give rise to.

All figures are from the series Chamomile (One Thousand Mes). Photographed by Stefano Caines.

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is the premier center of African American and Afro-diasporic studies. Yet, as the literary scholar Vanessa Valdés argues, we know little of the center’s namesake and his drive to collect and establish a renowned archive that emphasized the history, experience, and culture of African descended peoples and communities. Employing Valdés’s Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, this essay explores the politics of Afro-diasporic collection, archive, visibility, and futurity.

This essay uses Vanessa Valdés’s Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017) to reflect on the different stakes surrounding debates about Schomburg as a historical figure and also as a heuristic for grasping the complex vicissitudes of Afro-Latinx life. It challenges historicizations that presume Afro-Latinidad to be a stable and additive political ontology and that possibly foreclose black Latinx strategies of disidentification or refusal that transcend racial or ethnic nationalisms. It also provokes readers to think of what it would be like to write about Schomburg outside of frameworks that cast him as a heroic rescuer of memory and therefore as an avatar of idealized masculine respectability. Lastly, this essay asks that we consider not just the historical actors and cultural producers that Schomburg devoted himself to illuminating but also how his posthumous heroization cast a shadow over nonanglophone black activist-intellectuals who did not conform to normative early twentieth century US black nationalisms.

This essay uses Vanessa Valdés’s Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017) to reflect on the different stakes surrounding debates about Schomburg as a historical figure and also as a heuristic for grasping the complex vicissitudes of Afro-Latinx life. It challenges historicizations that presume Afro-Latinidad to be a stable and additive political ontology and that possibly foreclose black Latinx strategies of disidentification or refusal that transcend racial or ethnic nationalisms. It also provokes readers to think of what it would be like to write about Schomburg outside of frameworks that cast him as a heroic rescuer of memory and therefore as an avatar of idealized masculine respectability. Lastly, this essay asks that we consider not just the historical actors and cultural producers that Schomburg devoted himself to illuminating but also how his posthumous heroization cast a shadow over nonanglophone black activist-intellectuals who did not conform to normative early twentieth century US black nationalisms.

This response essay is a reflection on the composition of Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017) by its author and a sustained conversation with three of her peers, each of whom illuminate distinct aspects of Schomburg’s life and the scholarship surrounding him and his contemporaries. The exchange includes ruminations about marronage and Maroon subjectivity; the futurity of the archive, including its omissions; and a redefining of blackness as a force that ruptures and disrupts facile categorization.